TV To Go

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I’m in seat 23B on a coast-to-coast flight, wedged between Chatty Cathy and Snorin’ Norman. Despite that, and even though the guy in front of me has reclined his seat past Boeing’s mechanical tolerances, I’m deliriously happy. Why? Because I’m watching the Patriots play football, live  well, live to me — I recorded the game just before I left home.

If you’re addicted to TiVo, unfiltered TV can be painful to watch. Personal Video Recorders (PVR) are amazing, because you get to watch whatever you want whenever you want. Now you can also watch it wherever you want.

I’m watching my football game on a cunning little device  the Archos 320 Video Jukebox  that holds up to 40 hours of video. The screen is tiny and the sound strained. But like the singing frog, it’s not about how well it sings, just that it does so at all. I’ve been toting my entire music collection around for the last few years on my MP3 jukebox (more on those next week)  and now I can bring video too.

The Archos isn’t the only way to take video with you, of course. Here’s my run-down of the options available.

Portable DVD Players: When they first hit the market four years ago, these clamshell-type devices had small screens  usually no bigger than 5″ across — poor battery life and were difficult to use. They also typically cost well over $1,000. That’s all changed. The best portable DVD players today feature large screens  some as big as 10″ diagonally. They also include enough battery power for at least a 2-3 hour movie. Best of all, you can find them for well under $700  and cheaper versions come in at around $300.

Portable DVD players also connect to home theaters and regular televisions, so you can use them as both home and portable players. Of course, now that a good DVD player costs $70, that’s less of a selling point than in the past.

Keep in mind that these players won’t cut it if you want to record something when you’re on the road. If you also carry a PC with a DVD burner, you can record DVDs and then watch them on some models, but that’s not nearly as good as just recording it directly to the unit.

Notebook Computer: This is how I’ve brought video along in the past. I’ve copied DVD movies to my notebook’s hard drive, and even brought along special devices to record TV and movies directly to the notebook. That works pretty well, but since video munches hard-drive space, I either get about five hours of high quality video or I’m stuck with either a tiny playback window or blocky-full screen video.

On the other hand, if you’ve got a DVD/CD drive on your notebook, it’ll double as a decent portable DVD player. But there’s one large problem with playing video on a portable computer  whether DVD or hard-drive based. Video stresses every part of your system  the CPU has to work hard decompressing video, the screen never turns off, and constantly spinning either the DVD or hard drive hammers your battery life. Running video on my IBM Thinkpad typically cuts battery life in half. So watching Gangs of New York on a cross-country flight means I need three batteries.

Some newer notebooks have done away with external video input devices, combining a TV tuner with composite and S-Video input ports. But these heavyweight champions top out at over 10 pounds, with battery capacity measured in minutes, not hours. Not the best travel companion.

Handheld Video Player: This is what saved my flight. About the size of an Apple iPod, they include a 20 Gigabyte or bigger hard drive, and can play MP3 songs. But they also have a video screen big enough  and fast enough  to make watching even a football game exciting. At around 4″ across, the screen’s not huge, but it works.

Unlike a portable DVD player, these also record video. And they hold much more, despite the smaller package. The Archos crams about 40 hours of video on a 20 Gigabyte drive, thanks to the new MP4 video-recording standard. The downside: it’s new. Expect a few glitches as the company teases out the bugs.

In a few weeks, RCA will release its own version  the Lyra. Although the company was unable to provide a sample  or indeed any product information — in time for this story, I rustled up some specifications over at Amazon.com For more details on how these products stack up, see our sidebar on What To Buy.

Which Is Right: If you want video to go and you already have a notebook computer, you’re probably all set. You’ll need some way to get video into that machine, whether via a DVD drive or through a video-input add-on. We detail our favorite TV add-on in the sidebar. You can make backup copies of your DVDs to the machine’s hard drive, if you wish  we explained how in a previous Tech Tuesday . A notebook also does more than one thing  you can play games and write emails as well.

But like the Bass-O-Matic (it slices, it dices, mmm that’s great bass!), jack-of-all-trades means master of none. Don’t expect great quality video  particularly if your machine is two or three years old. And get yourself another battery or two as well.

If you want a portable player, your choices are clear. If it’s mostly for DVD playback, and you don’t mind lugging around the DVDs, portable DVD players are more mature, the screens are bigger and audio and video playback is much better than the newer handhelds.

But just as CD-based MP3 players gave way to Apple’s iPod, hard-drive based portable video players should eclipse portable DVDs. I expect a raft of new hand-held video players over the next year. Expect to see Creative, Apple and other MP3-player vendors deliver units with a wide range of features, screen sizes and prices. Keep an eye on the two most important features though: battery life and screen size. As the screen size goes up, the battery life plummets. I hope the next crop of players will also include removable batteries  so you can keep on watching even after draining the one that’s inside.

Jim Louderback is the Editor-in-Chief for Internet sites at Ziff Davis Media, which runs the popular technology sites PCMag.com and eWeek.com, along with print magazines like PC Magazine, eWEEK, Electronic Gaming Monthly and Computer Gaming World. Jim’s first adventure with computers began with playing Star Trek during high-school on a PDP-11. Since then he’s developed applications and installed networks for many Fortune 500 companies. For the last 12 years he’s been reporting on the technology industry in print, radio, television and the Web.

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